As a young man wanders beneath the canopy of a maple tree in the early twentieth century, a thirteen-year-old girl traipses through that very forest nearly a century later. Meanwhile, a woman makes her way through the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal in 2195. These three individuals are connected by a strange phenomenon, an unexplainable torn seam in time. It becomes the goal of Gaspery-Jacques Roberts and the Time Institute to figure out exactly what this strange rip in the timeline means.

After reading Station Eleven, I was hungry for another Mandel novel in my hands. Hence, I pre-ordered Sea of Tranquility at the beginning of 2022. She has a very unique writing style that features metafiction, often placing stories within stories, and overlapping character timelines. In both books that I have read by her, pandemics are experienced and heavily discussed by characters. For obvious reasons, this inclusion in her work is topical as much as it is critical. In many ways, Sea of Tranquility especially (since I read Station Eleven pre-pandemic) expresses and investigates ideas that have been weighing on my mind as well. It is little surprise, then, that Olive Llewellyn’s perspective, that of a novelist whose best seller is pandemic-related, was my favorite to follow.

There are so many details – both large and small – that I enjoyed in this narrative. Gaspery’s interactions with humans from a very different, earlier time felt quite believable and humorous. His observation on handshakes as an archaic practice abandoned long ago made me laugh. It also made me hope for this to become a reality! I loved the snippets extracted from Olive’s lectures and interviews as she moves from city to city, territory to territory (i.e., the U.S. is no longer the U.S.), for her book tour. As ironic as it is that she is discussing pandemic trends throughout history while a new pandemic is sneaking up on them all, I found this extremely relatable because this happened to us just two years ago and suddenly entire countries were mandating lock downs. I also appreciated the cli-fi elements; with each time jump, the terrain and resources become scarcer and scarcer until colonies are settled on the earth’s moon and even further out in the solar system. It’s terrifying because it is believable. 

This story explores time travel, the questioning of our own reality, and one’s fight for *humanity*. Sea of Tranquility is a fast-paced novel that tugs at your heart strings in a similar way that a distant violin’s strings haunt many a character between its pages.

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